‘Not half as much as I’m placing in Charles,’ she murmured cryptically.
Thirteen
JACKSON PARKED HER CAR at the top of Caroline Street, alongside the rear of Drury Lane Theatre, took a torch from her dashboard pocket and walked down towards the Aldwych. She knew the two pubs on the right-hand side, the Henry Fielding and the Pepys Tavern, but both were attached to the buildings beside them. Not a railing in sight, she thought grimly, convinced she was on a wild-goose chase. Susan’s directions had been hopelessly vague –
At one o’clock in the morning, this part of Covent Garden was deserted, although a regular flow of traffic passed along the Aldwych, heading from the Strand towards Fleet Street. The theatre, pubs and handful of restaurants had long since closed and Jackson had the road to herself. Making her way down the pavement, she flicked her torch at every vertical shadow thrown against the buildings by the street lighting, but each property was firmly attached to the one beside it. With a sigh of frustration, she crossed to the other side and walked back up, repeating the exercise. Nothing.
Nor was there anything Jackson would class as a bar, apart from the two pubs. One of the restaurants had its windows obscured by discreet net curtaining, but the name – Bon Appetit – hardly suggested a drinking establishment. She leaned on her car roof and studied an empty unit across the road which was undergoing renovation. There was no gap between it and the building to the right of it, but it stood on the corner of Caroline Street and Russell Street and the weathered fascia board above its whitewashed windows showed some barely discernible letters which looked like ‘Giovanni’s Bar & Grill’.
More in hope than expectation, Jackson made her way into Russell Street and walked along the side elevation of the unit, where more whitewashed panes reflected the beam of her torch. The gap, when she came to it, was just a yard wide and appeared to serve no purpose at all, apart from offering a glimmer of daylight to the few upper-storey windows in the adjoining property. The metal railings, seven feet high, six inches wide and without a crosspiece in the middle to offer a foothold, were merely preventing access to a narrow, twenty-yard-long passageway with a brick wall at the end. There were no doors opening off it and no sign that it was ever used, except as a receptacle for cigarette butts, which lay in filthy piles around the entrance.
Jackson moved to the left and lined up her torch to shine at a diagonal down the alley. The beam wasn’t strong enough to do more than produce a pinpoint of light on the bricks at the end, but she was able to steer it a fair way to the right before it jumped forward to the side wall of the passage. For whatever reason, this wasted space in the heart of London made a ninety-degree turn, and it didn’t take a genius to work out that it was heading back towards Giovanni’s redundant kitchen.
Nor did it take a genius to work out why the railings were necessary. During the previous three centuries, when Covent Garden had been a working flower and vegetable market and labour was cheap, the Garden never slept. Fresh produce came in during the hours of darkness to be sold by the stall holders the following day, chop shops and brothels stayed open round the clock, and theatregoers and opera lovers flocked in for afternoon matine?es and evening performances. Intruders down any passageway would have been met and challenged.
Now, with the market gone and the area converted to a daytime tourist attraction, only a fool would leave a recessed back door vulnerable to a burglar’s jemmy at night, and his insurance premiums would be prohibitive if he did. With another sigh of frustration, Jackson studied the bars and wondered how Acland had got over them without a lift. Assuming he was even in there.
She raised her voice. ‘Charles! Are you there? It’s Jackson. Susan sent me. Can I talk to you, please?’ No response. ‘Is
‘I’m hoping a friend of mine’s in there,’ she shouted. ‘Will you help me? He’s a young guy with an eyepatch.’
‘Who are you?’ The voice was cracked and gritty from smoke and alcohol.
‘My name’s Jackson. Is he with you?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Will you ask him to talk to me?’
‘I’ll ask but it doesn’t mean he’ll say yes.’ There was a long pause. ‘He says he’s not coming out. You’ll have to come in.’
‘Great!’ She ran her torch over the bars, which were held upright by two crosspieces at the top and bottom cemented into the brickwork on either side. ‘How do I get over this without help? Is there a knack to it?’
She heard a snicker of laughter. ‘It helps to be skinny, girl . . . and from the way you’re blocking most of the entrance, that ain’t the case. There’s ties holding the outer bars. If you can get a toe on to any of ’em it makes it easier . . . but you’d better put a coat over the spikes at the top. With your size, you’ll come down on ’em like a ton of bricks if you’re not careful.’
Jackson swore under her breath as she examined the inch-wide rivets that secured the framework into the buildings. Even in bare feet, she’d have trouble securing a toehold and she certainly didn’t fancy the ornamental spearheads that capped the upper crosspiece. Nevertheless she stooped to unlace her boots. ‘Will you do me a favour?’ she called. ‘Come and hold the torch so that I can see what I’m doing?’
‘As long as you don’t blame me when you go arse over tit.’
‘I won’t.’ She reached up to place her boots upside down on the two middle spikes, then shrugged out of her jacket and rolled it into a tight pad to cover the remaining spikes on the left-hand side. A figure approached down the passageway and she played torchlight briefly over a bearded face before handing the gadget through the bars. ‘Cheers.’
The light turned on her. ‘Gawd struth, you’re a big lass. You sure you want to do this?’
‘It depends how drunk you are.’ She reached through the bars again to guide the beam towards the rivets on the left. ‘Let’s see if you can keep your hand steady.’
‘Steady as a rock when I’m drunk,’ the man confided on a gale of alcoholic breath. ‘Only get the shakes when
